ovarian sex function and the art of fiction. The fact is, that modern
fiction being merely a description of human life in any of its phases, and
being the only art that can be exercised without special training or
special appliances, and produced in the moments stolen from the
multifarious, brain-destroying occupations which fill the average woman's
life, they have been driven to find this outlet for their powers as the
only one presenting itself. How far otherwise might have been the
directions in which their genius would naturally have expressed itself can
be known only partially even to the women themselves; what the world has
lost by that compulsory expression of genius, in a form which may not have
been its most natural form of expression, or only one of its forms, no one
can ever know. Even in the little third-rate novelist whose works cumber
the ground, we see often a pathetic figure, when we recognise that beneath
that failure in a complex and difficult art, may lie buried a sound
legislator, an able architect, an original scientific investigator, or a
good judge. Scientifically speaking, it is as unproven that there is any
organic relation between the brain of the female and the production of art
in the form of fiction, as that there is an organic relation between the
hand of woman and a typewriting machine. Both the creative writer and the
typist, in their respective spheres, are merely finding outlets for their
powers in the direction of least resistance. The tendency of women at the
present day to undertake certain forms of labour, proves only that in the
crabbed, walled-in, and bound conditions surrounding woman at the present
day, these are the lines along which action is most possible to her.

It may possibly be that in future ages, when the male and female forms have
been placed in like intellectual conditions, with like stimuli, like
training, and like rewards, that some aptitudes may be found running
parallel with the line of sex function when humanity is viewed as a whole.
It may possibly be that, when the historian of the future looks back over